Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying, backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. _Thou lovest all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit_. We are, too, apt to think that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a line of bare black backs before him. These things are written of ourselves. In his great book on 'Democracy in America,' De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of wealth and comfort. That danger has increased, till for the _rich_ on whom Christ called woe, we might well substitute the _comfortable._ At a time when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience: a crowd of men to lose himself in from God and his best friends: half a dozen base comforts, in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self? Comfort makes us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty. The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end, and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us all, which may be thus stated.